First, the pumpkin. Wait. Why does my pumpkin look like it is wearing a luchador mask? Well, because my original intent was to carve and paint this pumpkin like I did for a contest a few years ago.
I lost the contest, unfortunately. Not that I harbor any feelings of retribution or anything like that, because that would be silly. That was a dang good pumpkin.
Yes, maybe this is a bit dramatic. But hey, it's Halloween. Moving on.
I sliced up the pumpkins, removed the guts...
And cut them into neat sections so they would all fit on my baking sheet.
You can add some oil to the pumpkins before they go into the oven, but I opted to have the naked pumpkin in all its glory. I baked them at 350 for about 45 minutes until a fork easily went into the skin. I let them cool and peeled off the skin. I don't have a large capacity food processor, so I planned to do the puree in my blender. My poor blender, which I received as a wedding gift ten (10!) years ago and is not nearly as spunky as it once was. This is all to say that the blender didn't work out. So I had to use my mini three cup food processor. It took a little while, but everything was pureed and put in a bowl like so.
At this stage, you can probably see in the bowl where there is an excess of liquid. I stretched some cheesecloth around the mouth of another bowl, secured it with a rubber band and dumped the pumpkin puree into the cheesecloth to let it drain for about 30 minutes. It released a lot of liquid and left me with a more firm puree, though still a little less firm than what you find in a can.
Here's where the math comes in. Consider yourselves warned.
My yield was about six cups of pumpkin puree, which I bagged and froze in two cup servings. So that's roughly 48 ounces.
The going price at CVS this week for a 15 oz can of Libby's pumpkin is an unreal $0.88. I'm beyond positive that is the lowest price out there for pumpkin right now and I'm shocked that the news headlines haven't included stories on riots with frantic bakers raiding the shelves. I need about 3.2 cans of Libby's pumpkin to equal 48 oz at a cost of $2.82. Divided by 48 oz, that's roughly $0.06 per ounce.
On the other hand, I used two whole pumpkins for this project which were purchased for a total of $8.00. Divided by 48 ounces again, that gives us roughly $0.17 per ounce. However, when you include the time it took to prep, bake, puree, drain and package my pumpkin, the unit cost actually skyrockets to about $35.18 per ounce. No, actually that's not 100% accurate, but it sure feels correct.
In closing, it's more economically sound and sanity preserving to get in the car, go to the store, and pick your canned pumpkin off the shelf. I'm glad I tried this method, but I'm pretty sure I won't be replicating it.
